Description
The inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Bond, first published in 1946, seven years before Casino Royale.
Phyllis Bottome’s hero, Mark Chalmers, shares many similarities with Bond, he is dark haired, athletic, keen on skiing and winter sports, speaks fluent French and German and has a taste for wine, food and women. It seems that Bond may not have existed without Bottome. It was at the school she ran in Austria with her ex-spy husband, Ernan Forbes Dennis, that she taught Fleming to write.
It is 1938 and Chalmers, a master at Eton, is recruited by an old friend at the Foreign Office and introduced to his boss ‘B’. Reluctantly he agrees to take on a covert mission for British Intelligence – to parachute into Nazi-occupied Austria and pass on vital information to a British agent. Chalmers has no intention of committing himself beyond this one job but once he reaches his destination, he finds himself sucked into the cause – fighting fascism with the Underground.
